The School Library, Elementary and Rural, Vol. 32 (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

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Excerpt from The School Library, Elementary and Rural, Vol. 32

If specific legislation such as a rural credits bill or an eight-hour law could correct the spiritual impotence which our nation has revealed during the last two years, powers would arise no doubt which would force it through at any cost. A specific and localized danger as great as the slow sickness of soul that has come over us could be met by specific measures, and reaction would be instant and vigorous. Specific and local groups of men because specially affected would rise to the emergency. They would lead the others to a more intense realization, and the danger would be overcome. A concrete situation open to defined attack is always clearer to the popular eye. The public perhaps rightly demands specific and material reference.

But the nation's greatest danger at the present moment, a debilitated patriotism, is not concrete. It is a danger with unfortunately few specific references. We feel towards it a vague moral uneasiness and humiliation, but few or none of our citizens are aroused to definite recuperation. We look around mildly for a method of reaction, but find little in legislation or propaganda directly to overcome it. It is true, future dangers, most intense and specific, can arise from it, but such is not immediately evident to most Americans. The serious national danger is not localized; it is general. It affects no man very much. It affects all of us a little.

An anæmia hardly to be located in a special organ has faded and enfeebled the body of American patriotism. Lacking expression, lacking realization of earlier impulses, we have all fallen more or less into indifference. We have eaten the classic lotus. We have been doped with pacifism and lie in inert dreams.

In this spiritual crisis our danger is not from the wild, redeyed anarchist, nor from the violent English or German hyphenate. These can be met with definite attack. These are positive and state an issue. The danger is from the quiet, colorless, everyday citizen who "does n't see any sense in all this excitement," who "stays home and minds his own business," and nothing else. Our moral and patriotic insecurity lies in the very stuff of the nation, its human material, its common citizen.

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